I think that the most overwhelming similarity between both Dewey and Freire was the idea that the individual and community are not separate concepts in the education of the individual. Rather, they are linked to one another and have to be seen as reciprocal concepts. They do not exist in isolation, as if one has to make a choice between them. Rather, one has to seen them in conjunction with one another. Freire's idea that education is a tool for social policy and to express political reality is an important idea in his work. He does not see the education of the individual as separate from the social condition in which one lives. Either one is using education as a tool to remedy social inequality or one perpetuates it, in Freire's writing. To this extent, the individual and their social condition are strongly linked. In terms of Dewey, his critique of Rousseau as being too individualistic in his beliefs of education as well as Plato for being too socially driven in his reflects how Dewey himself believed that educational thought is one whereby the individual is taught to see themselves as part of a larger configuration. The development of the mind was a part of "the communal process" by which individuals do not have to be separate from society, but rather seek to develop education of the individual within it. Like Freire, this construct of education is one where the traditional philosophical binary division between individual and society is not as apparent:

Thus [Dewey believes] the individual is only a meaningful concept when regarded as an inextricable part of his or her society, and the society has no meaning apart from its realization in the lives of its individual members.

In here, there is a convergence of educational ideas between both thinkers in seeking to make the education of the individual a process of social construction, whereby elitism and oppression is replaced in a notion of community enhancement of the individual.